Don't Worry- It's just a small detour!

To all our visitors coming from the west:

Do not be alarmed if you see a notice for US-20 closure at the NY-PA border.
The detour only adds 40 seconds to your trip!

If you are already on I-90 in Pennsylvania, proceed as you normally would, exiting at the first exit in NY (Shortman Rd).  Go right on Shortman Road for ½ mile until it ends at US-20 then go left on US 20 for 7 miles until you reach Johnson Estate on your right.

If you are coming along US- 20 in PA, then  get on Eastbound I-90 at the State Line (this is the detour) and proceed to Shortman Rd and to us as above.

This detour will be in effect for at least another year as the bridge over the 200’ deep Twenty Mile Creek gorge has been deemed in need of replacement.

Aug 12, 2024 at 7:35 AM Permalink

All About Torpedo Red for Veteran's Day

ABOUT TORPEDO RED
This label was designed by the Johnson’s son, Spencer, a US Navy active duty EOD officer, in honor of his grandfather, the winery’s founder, Frederick Spencer Johnson.

The dragon carrying a torpedo was the insignia of the WWII Navy Squadron Torpedo Three which flew off the Yorktown from 1943-1945.

The silhouette of the airplane is that of a TBM Avenger, designed by Grumman Aircraft and built by General Motors. to carry a 2,000 pound aerial torpedo. On November 11, 1944*, then Lt. (junior grade) Frederick S. Johnson, age 23, single-handedly torpedoed and sank a Japanese destroyer for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross by Admiral John S. McCain (the recent Senator’s grandfather).

The wine is a blend of Chancellor and Pinot Noir both grown here on the farm. It is a smooth but almost-dry, full-bodied wine that is ready to drink now but should also continue improving with age for at least another five years. 

This is a limited, special edition label we are now offering every November in honor of all veterans and active duty military.

* Coincidentally, November 11th is Armistice Day, now called Veterans’ Day.

Nov 7, 2022 at 6:16 AM Permalink

Johnson Estate - Our Pet Policy

Johnson Estate Winery Pet Policy:
The recent opening of our new outdoor tasting venue, FLIGHT, adjacent to the vineyards has invited more questions about our pet policy – so here you go!

• Yes, we are a dog-friendly place.  We all grew up with dogs on this farm and love them. So,
  • ​If your Fido needs water, we have it available in the Tasting Room and at FLIGHT.
  • If your Fido needs to stretch his legs with a short walk in the grape rows, that’s fine, we welcome you.
• Here’s the caveats: People come first, dogs second.
• So, at the Estate this means that:
  • Dogs should be on leash at all times.
  • Dogs must be picked up after (if you don’t have bags, we do).
  • If Fido wants to come into the Tasting Room or lie under your table at FLIGHT, we will poll other customers already in that space. If other guests have concerns (allergies, fears, whatever), then we still have water for Fido, he/she may still take a walk, but may not come inside or accompany you to FLIGHT.
  • We trust you that your Fido is well-trained, around strangers and around other dogs. If he/she has issues, please stick to water and walks for your pet.

May 30, 2022 at 8:33 AM Permalink

Celebrating 60 Years -

Johnson ESTATE:  Celebrating the Founder’s 100th Birthday

NYS’ oldest estate winery has multiple anniversaries to celebrate this year!
Until Sept 26th:  Founders' Red & Brut - 20% Anniversary Discount!  Use Code - 60YEARS

Westfield, (NY) – If you had been in the winery on September 5th, you might have been greeted with a glass of Johnson Estate’s Brut sparkling wine so that you could join in a toast to the winery founder, Frederick S. Johnson Sr., who would have been 100 years old.  And that’s not the only anniversary being celebrated by Johnson Estate, NY’s oldest estate winery.  This year is also the 60th anniversary of the winery’s establishment, as Fred Sr. began the winery on his father’s fruit farm in 1961.  Both the winery building and the old barn are now 100 years old and the farmhouse, where third-generation Fred Johnson Jr. lives with his wife, Jennifer, is 200 years old. 

Fred Sr. would be proud to see the vineyards loaded with fruit, ready for harvest.  And he'd be proud to see over forty award-winning wines filling the shelves of the century-old Tasting Room, formerly his father’s apple cold storage facility.  And on those shelves he would see our award-winning Founders' Red, named for Fred Sr. and his father. Founders’ is made from Fred Sr.’s favorite Chancellor grapes (plus a little Pinot Noir), planted on the site of his father’s favorite cherry orchard. And estate-grown, hand-picked and lightly-pressed Pinot Noir and Chardonnay are used to make the new dry Brut, the perfect celebratory wine with elegant effervescent bread notes.  To celebrate these Labor Day Anniversaries, we're offering a 20% discount on both Founders' Red and our new Brut sparkling wine from September 5-26th.   The discount is available in the winery or online (use the promotion code 60YEARS).

This year’s anniversaries make it a fitting year to open FLIGHT, the name of the winery’s new outdoor wine and food pairing location.  It has beautiful vineyard vistas and permits guests to enjoy the sights and smells of harvest while savoring flights of wine, wines by the glass, and curated cheese and charcuterie boards which include locally-sourced seasonal fruits, nuts, crisps and more.   FLIGHT will be open well into October, weather permitting and reservations are not required.  And yes, the name FLIGHT was inspired by Fred Sr.’s service as a Navy pilot during World War II and Fred Jr.'s love of flying. 

The 2021 harvest has begun and the winery’s Great Grape Walks have started - they are the perfect way to experience the estate’s vineyards, most first planted by Fred Sr. sixty years ago.  These are self-guided walks during which guests sample and fill their baskets with premium estate-grown grapes, including Fred Sr,’s favorite, Chancellor. Afterwards, guests enjoy a flight of three wines and a "petite" cheese board at FLIGHT.  Families with children and dogs with leashes are welcome.  Visit our Event Calendar to learn more and to make reservations. 

Johnson Estate Winery, with 110 acres of vineyards, is the oldest estate winery in NYS and a founding member of Lake Erie Wine Trail. For more information please visit www.JohnsonWinery.com, or www.facebook.com/johnsonwinery, or call 716-326-2191.

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Sep 14, 2021 at 8:33 AM Permalink

Preparing for a New Chardonnay Vineyard - What Takes Five Years?

Taking advantage of early spring dry weather to prepare for 12,500 new Chardonnay vines. 
The seagulls from Lake Erie are looking for grubs and helping to fertilize!

What Takes Five Years? 
To change a field from one variety of grapes to a new variety. Here are the steps:

• After harvest, we remove the old vines, and trellis system including the posts.
• The following spring, we plant Sudan grass which is a kind of Sorghum that grows in very thick stands eight feet tall.
• That fall, we mow and mulch the Sudan grass and then spread a generous weight of pomace (grape pressings from the winery).  We do this to rebuild the soil’s structure and to boost its organic matter.
• The following spring, we disc the pomace and shredded Sudan grass into the soil, smooth the field, and plant Sudan grass again.
• In the second fall, we shred the grass and add more pomace.
• Finally, in the spring of year three, we disc in the prior year’s shredded grass and pomace, smooth the field, remove large rocks, to prepare to plant the new vineyard.
• Before we plant, we will install perforated drainage pipe under every third row to help keep the vines’ roots from drowning during wet spring weather. This is disruptive enough that we will smooth those rows again.
• Then the rows are laid out on 8.5 foot centers, vines planted, trellis posts installed, lowest wires strung, drip irrigation tubing hung and connected, and cover crop planted between the rows.  Then we hope for sunny weather!

Before we can harvest our first berry of Chardonnay from this new vineyard, another three years will pass during which we add more trellis wires, trim, train and tie the growing vines, and pinch all the new fruit blossoms off in the first two years so that the vines can put all their energies into growing roots and canes.  This is, of course, in addition to the regular seasonal jobs of pruning and controlling weeds, insects, and fungal diseases.

So for this new field of Chardonnay, we expect our first partial crop in the fall of 2023, after picking our last crop of Delaware in 2018.

Mar 23, 2021 at 12:53 PM Permalink

From Fred: Reflections on a Winter's Morn

Mid-Winter Pillar of Fire Sunrise

This Sunday morning, January 24, was dawning grey and still, with about a foot of snow on the ground when I walked to the bay window with my first cup of tea in hand and was greeted by one of the most unusual sunrises I’ve ever seen. It lasted less than two minutes, and I think that it was caused by the sunrise being focused through a hole in the clouds just behind the ridge of hills that make up the Allegheny escarpment two miles south of Lake Erie. This is the so called “Chautauqua Ridge” which is notorious on the evening weather shows for its Lake Effect snow accumulations.

Fifty year ago today, it was likely also a grey day in Massachusetts where I was an 18 year-old headed off to the required Sunday Chapel with about 800 other boys.  Dark suits, white shirts, and neat ties required, and as a dorm proctor I would have been responsible for making sure that my various tenth-grade charges made it to church on time and then, as a student deacon, for helping to pass the collection plates during the offertory. Hopefully, the sermon and the service lifted our sights above our teenage worries.

Always an early-rising farm boy,  I’ve seen a lot of sunrises since; on at least five continents and three oceans, and it's a joy to see this, one of the most uplifting sunrises right out the back bay window of what was, originally, my grandfather’s house to which we have returned in our “retirement”.

Over the years, I have experienced far beyond my just allotment of good fortunes and adventures, yet I am thankful this morning that in returning to one of the places of my beginning, that in this Sunday sunrise over vineyards, I should be granted such an inspiring glimpse of a more fundamental perspective.

Fred Johnson

Jan 24, 2021 at 11:57 AM Permalink

"Christmas in a Bottle"

    
MULLED OR SPICED WINES:  Red Ipocras and White Ipocras
The Germans call it "Gluhwein" - literally, wine that makes you glow - and it is a staple of their Christmas markets to this day.  The Swedes call it Glogg and the Italians borrow some French to call it "Vin Brule’".  Ipocras is sweet and generously flavored with several of the spices popular in old England. These include ginger, cinnamon, and clove, and they leave a wonderfully warm and lingering aftertaste.  In fact, the recipe we use is an adaptation of an Elizabethan formula.

A BRIEF HISTORY
Warm, spiced wines have a long tradition going back to the early Greeks who believed that the combination of warmth, alcohol, and spices had excellent medicinal properties to combat the infirmities of the cold winter season.  They called the mixture “hippocras” after Hippocrates, the father of medicine.  The medieval French called it Ypocras, which the English often changed to Ipocras.  Chaucer mentions it in his first work: The Book of Duchess in 1370, a dirge he dedicated to Blanche, the Duchess of Somerset who died of the plague at age 26. 

In 16th century England, both white and red Ipocras, had become a drink of the highest nobility. At a time when both sugar and spices were rare and precious, Ipocras was reserved for the use of royalty at the most precious ceremonial occasions. Indeed, Ipocras was the libation presented by the Lord Mayor of London to Queen Elizabeth I at her coronation.

Johnson Estate's founder, Fred Johnson, was inspired to produce Ipocras to celebrate the commissioning of the Sea Lion, an authentic replica of a 16th century merchant ship which was built nearby on Chatauqua Lake.

SERVING SUGGESTIONS

Serve it warm in a mug or cut it 50/50 with hot apple cider and serve it in a beer stein with a stick of cinnamon. Some traditions fortify it with apple or grape brandy for extra warmth, but that sometimes can be too much of a good thing. And here are some food pairing suggestions including Triple Ginger Cookies!

TRY IT NOW
Try a bottle of Red Ipocras or White Ipocras today, or here's a "one click" to try them both!

Dec 8, 2020 at 2:13 PM Permalink

We Shall Persevere - A Look at 100 Years Ago

PERSPECTIVE:  100 years ago - in 1920 - at the Johnson Farm (aka Sunnyslope)
Circa 1954, Owner Fred Johnson Jr. with grandfather, Frederick William Johnson.     

• My grandfather, Frederick William Johnson, is building an apple cold storage shed.  He frames it out with big timbers repurposed from a dairy barn that in turn was built about 1820 by William Peacock.  The cold storage shed is now our winery and the those original 1820 timbers still hold the roof up.
• His wife of 3 years, Nan Scouller, has presented him with a baby daughter, Antoinette, who in 1920 is about to turn two.  My father will be born in September of 1921.  The brick house next door that he has been fixing up since 1911 is now fully ready for his young family.
• The fourth wave of the “Spanish Flu” epidemic has just ended.  It killed 675,000 Americans and perhaps 50 million people world-wide. There is no vaccine.
• The country is in a severe post-war, post-pandemic recession.  There are race riots in Chicago and anarchist bombings on Wall Street. 
• President Wilson is pretending to govern the country from his sickbed. FDR, running as Vice President, will get trounced in November 1920 election: 404 electoral college votes to 127.
• Prohibition becomes the law of the land, and grandfather reputedly makes his first batch of wine that fall.
• The Dust Bowl (Like Erie is over five feet below its current high levels), the Depression, World War II and the atom bomb will all follow, but Grandfather’s little farm enterprise prospers in good times and survives in bad.

So here we are, one hundred years later, struggling to navigate the latest pandemic, looking forward to a great harvest, but uncertain about political, economic, and environmental futures.  But we have been here before.  We will persevere, as will you.  As farmers, we know that there will always be challenges ahead, both man-made and God-given.  But we are always optimists; determined optimists, dedicated to always leaving this place and our customers and community a little better and a little happier than they were before.

Jul 15, 2020 at 2:16 PM Permalink

Outdoor Tastings in Farmhouse Gardens

     
OUTDOOR TASTINGS IN FARMHOUSE GARDENS (weather permitting)

• Saturdays and Sundays, 11am to 5pm (July - September)
• Sixteen wines offered on Outdoor Tasting Menu
• First come, first serve; guests may need to wait in garden
• No groups greater than six people, please
• Limited seating available - purchase picnic fare and/or enjoy a glass of wine in the gardens
• And come and see our Daisy Lane - great for photos!                                                
  REMINDERS:  WINERY IS OPEN DAILY, 10am - 6pm
• Tasting Room - Has reduced capacity; tastings are first come, first served
• (no reservations needed at this point, but we will let you know)
• Groups limited to four to six
• Wine by the bottle and picnic fare for outside consumption
• Curbside Pick-up/Delivery available daily

Jun 23, 2020 at 6:51 PM Permalink

Veraison

What is Veraison?
Taken from the French, veraison is the change of color of grapes.  It is a signal that the plant and its berries are putting their energies into ripening the berries instead of berry 

The unripe grapes, all a bright green color, begin to turn either pale yellow or dark blue/purple in the case of “red” wine grapes.  This is a photograph of Johnson Estate's Pinot Noir grapes which have started but not completed veraison.  At this stage, the vines have begun to transport energy stores to the grapes and they increase in size as sugar levels increase.

Birds Looking for Early Ripening Grapes
In western New York and Pennsylvania, where 30,000 acres of vineyards are found along Lake Erie, the end of September is known for the aroma of ripening grapes and the commencement of the region's harvest of Concords.  When this begins to happen, it is a signal that the grapes are becoming sweeter.  The majority of the region's vineyards are Concord grapes which tend to ripen later than some wine varieties.  As a result, the early-ripening wine varieties, like Johnson Estate's Maréchal Foch and Pinot Noir need to be protected from birds whose choices are fewer at the beginning of the season.

At Johnson Estate, these two early-ripening grape varieties are protected from hungry birds through the use of ballons, kevlar streamers, and periodic cannon shots.  In addition, there is a recording of a hawk attacking a starling and all of these efforts help to diminish the birds' interest in these first-ripening grapes.

More Information may be found here:
https://winefolly.com/review/veraison-when-grapes-turn-red/https://articles.extension.org/pages/31098/parts-of-the-grape-vine:-shoots

Fred Johnson, Owner

Aug 26, 2019 at 7:26 PM Permalink